Home Staging Tips: DIY Or Professional Carpet Cleaning Services?
Many homeowners choose to carpet at least portions of their home. Carpeting is one of the less expensive choices when it comes to home flooring, it comes in so many different colors and patterns, and in rooms like the bedroom, that really need to be nice and cozy, there may be no better alternative.
Carpets do of course require daily maintenance, in the form a a good vacuuming. However, even if you vacuum your carpets every day without fail, there is going to come a time when that is just no longer enough and it becomes fairly obvious that they are actually going to have to be properly cleaned. And if you are about to put your home on the market for sale, then a carpet cleaning is pretty much a must.
Although carpet cleaning services all over the country are usually affordable enough, there are still always going to be those people who would prefer to save themselves some money and try doing the job themselves.
It all sounds easy enough in the beginning. Rent a carpet cleaning machine for the day, which you can usually do at a local home store, or even at some grocery stores, put in a couple of hours work with the end result being a nice clean carpet and a bit more cash in your pocket. The problem is that it is often not that easy, and DIY carpet cleaning can actually end up damaging your precious carpets.
Here are some of the most common problems that might occur:
Over-shampooing
Even if they read the instructions that came with the carpet cleaning machine, and the carpet shampoo itself properly, if their flooring is particularly dirty its tempting to use a bit more shampoo than recommended to get it even cleaner.
Unfortunately what usually actually happens is that by using too much shampoo it simply isn’t possible to rinse it all out with a lower powered rental machine and some of the suds are left behind to become magnets for dirt. These suds also leave behind a unpleasant sticky feeling much of the time and dull the colors of the fibers.
Skipping the Recommended Tests
Every carpet cleaning machine – and the associated cleaning products – comes with a warning that it should be tested on a small, inconspicuous patch of the carpet that will be cleaned before shampooing begins to make sure that it will not discolor or damage the carpet.
Sadly, in their haste, as most machines are only rented for a day, that is a step that too many people skip and they are then horrified when they are left with a room full of damaged flooring and are scrambling around looking for local carpet cleaning services that might be able to help fix the mess (which they often cannot, it is too late.)
Dealing with the Drying Process the Wrong Way
A wet carpet has to be dried properly or all kinds of things can go wrong. That means the all of it has to be dried as much as possible at the end of the cleaning process and then left to dry completely in a well ventilated place.
A professional carpet cleaning company actually has huge machines, almost like giant hairdryers, powered by a truck , to dry everything off very quickly, but a homeowner taking the DIY route does not. Mould, mildew and excessive shrinkage are all almost inevitably caused by allowing a carpet to remain wet too long. If this happens, then it makes dirt seem like it was a very small problem indeed.
What far too many homeowners discover is that their attempt at do it yourself cleaning ends up costing them far more than a good professional cleaning company would have charged to come in and do the job in the first place. The lesson they learn is that while saving money is not a bad idea there are certain things – including cleaning carpets – that really shouldn’t be scrimped on, especially when staging – and then showing – a home for sale.